How Design and Cybernetics Reflect Each Other

A keynote speech delivered by Ranulph Glanville at the Relating Systems Thinking & Design 3 Symposium (RSD3) at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design on 15-October-2014 with friendly approval by Prof. Birger Sevaldson (conference chair). Video by Thomas Fischer.

[@johnmortimer3209]

Powerful and helpful to move understanding forward.

[@PeteZelchenko]

Glanville died only a few weeks after this presentation, December 20, 2014.
@32:23 After noting how humans are obsessed with preserving every possible endangered species, Glanville says, "I find it strange that we're not interested in different ways of thinking. ...Design gives us a different way of looking at and solving the things we call problems."
@34:42 On conversations: "Meaning is in my head and your head, and what's in your head and what's in my head are completely different. They're absolutely unavailable to each other." Meaning is always ambiguous, and language can't do as an unambiguous code "unless we do a lot of work." And yet "conversation is a circular activity" like any self-regulating system. But, "How about if you had a conversation with yourself? How would you do that?" You don't steer it like a self-regulating navigator. And everyone has different frames of mind and modes of being at various times, so you could write notes and look at them later, being able to see it from such different frames of mind. @40:57 "For me, this activity -- this thing of holding a conversation with yourself, usually through paper and pencil -- is what is at the center of designing. This, for me, is the act that makes design, design. Without this, you're not doing design, you're doing problem solving."
@41:56 "And this is, for me at least, a major source of novelty in designing: that because there is always this difference between personae, between marking and viewing, between two people...there's always this potential not to look at it as an error, but to look at it as an opportunity. And I think that what designers do is they make errors that are opportunities; they hold conversations with themselves. And it is through this that they manage to do something which is quite, quite magical, which is to find the new. And it's through this that designers 'solve problems' [scare quotes] -- but they don't. What designers do is they go on a sort of wander through the forest and find a beautiful place to sit down and say, 'That's why I went on this walk today.' It doesn't mean that you're not dealing with the functional aspect of things. It doesn't mean that you're not dealing with well-madeness. It just means that you leave room for the delight for yourself of making something that you haven't expected, and for the delight that this can bring others. And this form of activity is entirely cybernetic. And that's why I say that cybernetics and design are opposite sides of the same coin. At least my cybernetics and my design are. And I hope that for some of you, now your cybernetics and your design are. Thank you."

[@cyberjltoo]

The difference between cybernetics and systems thinking in theory (for me) is one's starting point differs for each. Thanks, one answer to the question; How do I design revitalization without gentrification?

[@allurbase]

I'd rather have the hard math thinking instead of the random babbling without hard facts i'm getting from this videos.